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iPhone in Canada: The numbers take 2

As a follow-up to my previous post where I looked at the costing for data plans on Rogers in Canada for iPhone users, I needed to update the information based on the latest changes and limited time offers. For those who follow me on Twitter already know, I got myself the iPhone last Friday (that was fun). Just before the launch, Rogers announced a special time limited data plan at CA$ 30 for 6Gb of data per month, that could be added to any voice plan you wanted.

The one thing they didn’t say is that you needed to sign-up for a voice plan of at least $35 per month to be eligible to the $199 / $299 purchase price for the iPhone 8Gb / 16Gb respectively. If you want a $30 per month voice plan, the phone will cost you an extra $50 (less that 1 year of $5 extra subscription if you do the math). In addition to that, they are offering Visual voice mail for $8 per month as a stand-alone offer or for $15 per month part of a pack that also includes caller id and way to many SMS messages. Therefore, the cheapest comparable monthly plan that you could go with a 6Gb per month data plan was, under this offer, CA$ 73.

So how does it look when you map this pricing against the others in the graph I previously used:

We have a clear winner there, except if you will only use less than about 400Mb of data per month. But then again, you need to hurry to get this plan as Rogers / Fido announced it would only be available until the end of August 2008… except if they decided to extend the offer.

One more thing, if you manage to exceed the 6Gb limit, pricing is identically to the iPhone plans, e.g. $0.5 per megabyte for the first 60Mb and $0.03 per megabyte thereafter. This means that 10Gb of data per month will still be under $225… OK, not as cheap as the unlimited data in the USA, but almost half of the original iPhone pricing offering from the canadian mobile network operator.